Friday, January 30, 2015

Black Dog Down - Month One

They’re
making a reference, of course, to Pavlov’s dog. While Anna Pavlova was busy
inventing a meringue dessert, her dear old relative was training pooches. Okay,
I might be short on historical accuracy there, but Ivan Petrovich’s experiments
with conditioned canines form part of the foundations of modern behaviour
therapy.

In essence,
this Russian scientist dude would sound a buzzer at every mongrel mealtime
until eventually the dogs associated the noise with the arrival of their Chum.
To the extent that they’d drool in expectation whenever they heard the sound,
irrespective of whether any food showed up.

As a direct
result of these experiments, a Black Dog arose to avenge the cruel use of his
brethren in scientific research. He escaped Pavlov’s lab and to this day he
roams the globe, seeking human prey. Even as he stalks fresh fodder, he
rarely leaves his previous victims alone. He remembers where he buried the
bones and digs them up now and again, to worry and gnaw at them and keep his
teeth sharp.

Pavlov’s
Black Dog. That’s how I’ve thought of him for a few years now. Because before
he broke out of the lab the bastard seemed to have learned a few tricks from
his master. He conditions us – and by us, I mean anyone who has suffered with
depression for any protracted period.

‘It’s a
matter of instinct, a matter of conditioning. It’s a matter of fact.’

So goes the
song.

And that’s
pretty much how the Black Dog operates.

It’s our
natural instinct to respond emotionally to all the shhhstuff that hits the
various fans in life. And lord knows, plenty of lives are plagued by more crap
than could ever be produced by one dog.

So if it
keeps hitting fans and keeps getting flung our way, those negative emotional
responses become automatic. Embedded in the way we think and feel. Notions that
we’re ‘not good enough’ or we’re failures in some way become, in our heads,
fact.

You can
probably achieve similar results on prison inmates. Subject them to the same
daily routine, day-in, day in (they’re prisoners, they don’t get days out).
Come day of release, you can expect a significant number of ex-offenders to
carry their prison behaviour with them into free society. Which will often lead
them back guess where.

Depression
is a prison sentence for our brains. We’re primed to react the same way, no
matter how trivial the trigger. Heck, sometimes we don’t even need the buzzer
to sound or the bell to ring. We’re already feeling it, chained to the post in
the Black Dog’s yard, choked by the collar.

Speaking for
myself, as a writer I routinely send out manuscripts to agents and the like,
meeting the inevitable publishing-industry walls and it’s easy to see how
repeated rejections could get you down a bit. To the extent that, if I’m being
honest, I send them out a lot less routinely than I’d like. That, I should add,
formed no part of my personal triggering incident – I think the original root
causes of my depression are historic and ancient enough now to be largely
irrelevant. But negative experiences will of course reinforce the Black Dog’s
conditioning and it (too) frequently gets to the point where I can’t handle the
slightest disappointment in life.

Which,
clearly, is never going to work, because a life without disappointments is
about as likely as world peace.

Sparing the
details, last year was a particular nadir for me. And I don’t mean Nadir
Sawalha. This coming year might be no different, but as is invariably the case
around this time in the calendar I am full of intentions to turn things around.

Question is,
what’s to be done?

A Black
Dog’s not just for Christmas, it’s for life. Well, that’s how it feels. Is it
like alcoholism – you’re never actually cured? (Couldn’t say with any
certainty, because I’ve never been a bona fide alcoholic.)

Regardless,
there’s only one viable option, as far as I can see.

It’s time to
train the Dog.

CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) has had some success for me in the past, but like a gym
membership it’s too easy to lapse. It’s all about catching those negative
automatic thoughts and combating them with reason. Easier said than done and
just like at that gym or for anyone battling weight problems you have to
persist and stick with it to see any results. All too often if we don’t see
those results, we grow impatient and we give it up as a lost fight. With that
in mind, my reason currently tells me that to treat an invisible disease I’m
going to need visible results within a reasonable timescale. Which translates to
tackling external factors which may have a knock-on effect on the internal

Hence, I’ve
begun this January by dealing with my home environment. That means cleaning,
tidying, general de-cluttering. Chucking out stuff I don’t need and purchasing
a new item or two that, in theory, ought to provide some tangible improvements
in lifestyle. Fairly obvious stuff, I know, and it’s not going to win me a
Nobel prize for psychology. But hey, Nobel = no bell = no, er, salivation. And early indications are that it is making a
(modest) difference.

Money, I
appreciate, is not always an option for everyone – I had to dig into savings
and do myself out of the huge 0.1% interest I could have had from the bank. So
purchases might be out of the question, but I can recommend small changes.
Small is, in fact, key. When you’re training for a marathon you don’t run the
full 26 miles right away. Long-term conditioning can’t be overcome with
anything but long-term efforts. And even when it came to something as simple
and trifling as the sorting and tidying I really had to compartmentalise the
operation, break it down into manageable stages. There are days when even small
tasks feel pointless and too much like hard work, so a coping strategy is
essential, as ridiculous as that may sound. As of today, the job is nowhere
near done, but improvements are already discernible. By picking a single room
as my weekly focus I ought to have environs I can feel better about by the end
of February.

That sounds
realistic and do-able to me. Even allowing for down days.

The Black
Dog, I think, festers in dirt and disorganisation. He loves a mess. So, in
theory, I’m making him less welcome. Less at home.

None of this
may work. None of this may hold, but we’ve made a start. And I mean to report
in to this blog every month, to track progress and share results for the
benefit of, well, me – and others who are more familiar with depression than
they ever wanted to be.

At this
stage, I couldn’t even tell you what the next steps are in this twelve month
programme. At the very least, I want to be the one ringing the bell or buzzer
and not feeding that bastard pooch. By the end of the year, I really hope to be
able to report just one thing:

Black Dog
Down.

Time will
tell. See you back here in a month.

SAF 2015

Visit Black Dog Tribe for more information on depression and other mental health issues.

2 comments:

This post makes interesting reading for me, not least in that it mirrors my own experiences closely enough that I could almost hear the metaphorical bell.

These days, I spend rather too much time feeling emotionally muted, because I've learned that living on 'mute' is better (on average) than having the highs and consequent lows that my emotional reception seems to tune into. Mute isn't bad, but it's rather unfulfilling… it can't mute the bad stuff without also muting the good. It's living, but not exactly Having A Life (whatever that means).

This year, due a small but significant and long-awaited change in circumstances, I'll start turning up the volume again, in small increments, and I'll have support where it's needed.

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About Me

Born in Penzance in 1967. From the age of about three I was probably dreaming of writing for Doctor Who. Certainly it wasn't a case of just watching it: I'd go to bed with all sorts of adventures and story possibilities buzzing around in my head. From the age of eleven, I knew, whenever any aunts and uncles asked the "What do you want to do when you grow up?" question, the stock replies of jet pilot, train driver, astronaut were never going to be good enough for me. "I want to be a writer", I always said. And, what do you know, I am.